Fo’ sho! let me know if you have any questions! Happy to help as I can.
I guess to answer your question, to my knowledge there there isn’t a super simple way to use those RF door switches with Home Assistant unless you have a rfxtrx hub or tellstick or something like.
The 433 RF stuff is great for cheap outlets and simple circuits and such, but it has issues like needing antennas and being really easily to intercept or jam. If you have power at the source, I’d probably look towards using a NodeMCU CH340 chip or other ESP8266 variants for a low budget sensor node. It’ll be a lot easier to use with Home Assistant… especially if you go with MQTT or something like that.
I might reconsider if we ever add an Raspberry Pi RF Sensor component to Home Assistant.
If you have the budget, the king of robust RF is z-wave though. Those devices are solid, low-ish power, but a little pricey.
yes. i like z-wave too but like you said quite pricey. imagine 20 to 30 of those sensors will cost a bomb. that’s why i’m considering other options such as Mysensors. But those generic 433Mhz sensors that are available everywhere are hard to resist. They are cheap and look pretty good.
that’s a turn off. my main purpose of home automation is for security. If it can be easily intercepted or jammed, then no way I am getting this. I am wondering is Mysensors also subject to such concern?
Anyway, thanks a lot @brusc. Your videos have helped and inspired me in this exciting hobby of home automation.
have a look at the moteino or jeelab stuff, which use the RFM12/RFM69 433MHz radio transeivers.
they are low power (perfect for battery) and relatively cheap. there has been some work for a 433-WiFi MQTT bridge, however i don’t know what sort of state it is in.
you will require a MQTT bridge - which will allow you to use them as MQTT sensors. i would ask over on the moteino/jeelabs forums.
not particularly familiar with mysensors.
but either way, using 433MHz needs a base/hub to connect to HASS, and will be a bit of programming/stuffing around to get it working. Take you time and research, and order a few at a time to play with before diving right in.
If you can get power out to the device, go ESP8266 (NodeMCUs) if you need batteries, set up mysensor/RFM12/69 sensor network.
Happy to help! Glad I can contribute here by making videos and such. I keep saying this, but one day I’ll learn to code and actually be able to contribute some components or something. I appreciate all the love from the HA community! Let me know if there is anything I can do to help!
In my case, I will give a try to the Arduino with NRF24L01+ using mysensors. I already ordered the parts and I will comment in this Post as soon as I have something working.
I expect each sensor/activator to be less than 10$ including case and power. My only concern is about the range… And well… My other concern is to manage 220V with the relays.
I would love to use the esp8266 but I didn’t see any straight forward solution to build the sensors and connect them to HA.
i have just made my emonTX wireless by simply outputting the data it is collecting to serial, which is connected to an esp8266 (nodeMcu). This then posts to EmonCMS when data is presented. See https://github.com/tzapu/emonTXSerialGateway for more details.
It should be really straightforward to do this with a base station 433MHz arduino feeding data to an ESP8266, which then posts the data to MQTT or via REST.
others have tried to get the RFMxx to run on the esp8266 but i am not sure how successful they have been.
I want to do this - rfmxx sensors running on little LiPo’s, with an esp gateway running off of mains power.
I have a 433Mhz to mqtt gateway that I have been using here for the last 2 or so years. It takes 433Mhz from PIR’s, Door Sensors (like at the top of this article) and doorbell buttons etc and turns them into mqtt messages for use with HA. It also has a transmitter so it can control 433Mhz switches. It’s designed for Arduino Mega 2560. I use it for room presence and as well as turning lights on and off automatically when I walk into a room. Is this of interest to anyone?
Please don’t buy those. They receiver is terrible. Max range you will get is about 10 Meters. You need to buy a receiver that uses a proper superhetrodyne chip, not just an op-amp.
and planning to use this to receive data from 433Mhz sensors around the house and transmit command to switch on/off 433Mhz wall switches. It will be link to HA via MQTT.
I will share the steps and results once I start building it. Expected to arrive in 2 weeks time.
Thanks for sharing the progress. It looks really interesting I will probably try to do the same.
I’m wondering how you will know the frequencies/channels of the different wall switches and sensors… There is an easy way to do it?